Digital imaging systems, such as those employed for converting still color photographic slides into digital format for display on a color television monitor, customarily encode the output of an electronic imaging device, such as an opto-electronic film scanner, to some prescribed resolution and store in an associated database a separate image file for each film image. In many imaging system applications involving the storage of a large number of images, a key consideration is how easily a user can locate a particular image of interest out of all the images in the database. When the use wishes to review a particular stored image, the images are customarily called up from the database, one at a time, until the image of interest has been located. Obviously, such a search and locate scheme is very operator intensive and time consuming, especially for very high resolution images (e.g. 2K.times.3K pixel arrays resolved to eight or sixteen bits per color per pixel) which require very large data files. To simplify this task, the U.S. Patent to Taylor et al, U.S. Pat. No. 4,302,776 describes a readout and display system through which a plurality of reduced size pictures may be displayed in a single video frame by compressing the size of the plural images (subsampling the images) as they are called up from the database and displaying those plural images as a `browse` montage of miniature pictures. Unfortunately, because the system of Taylor et al stores the digitized images as relatively high resolution data files and requires a subsampling operation for each of these files in the course of generating and displaying the browse montage, it is still relatively slow and requires substantial memory. This is a particular problem for databases containing very high resolution images. What is needed is a technique for creating a browse montage which is faster and simpler.